The Origami Dragon And Other Tales (9 page)

Matt pulled out
his emergency flashlight and caught Chen by the shoulder. He
pointed at the red lights of the damaged panel, and Chen nodded.
They had spent so long doing repairs that they instinctively knew
which systems were the most important from all their repair works.
Chen stuck to the controls while Matt rushed to the life-support.
He reached an air filter and was surprised to find that the problem
was nothing more serious than a broken fuse. He replaced it
quickly, noting with concern that the insulation foam seemed burnt
and twisted.

A series of
explosions vibrated overhead. Matt counted seven explosions as he
worked.

“Bet those were
the message drones,” he complained as he worked.

Chen soon
joined him in his repair work. The two men worked with efficiency
born from long practice, quickly replacing burnt fuses and layers
of insulation. Chen jumped on the comms panel and sent a new
message off to Earth. The Anomaly’s light would have reached the
Agency long before Chen’s message, so Earth would know something
was up.

Matt worked
desperately to get the station sensors to work while Chen reported
all that they knew. The Anomaly flickered between colours and
pumped out radiation in bursts. Matt and Chen could feel their
adrenaline pumping through their bodies, both men ready to make a
leap for their transport spaceship, which was docked on the side of
the station opposite the Anomaly.

The Anomaly
kept changing, defying everything they thought they knew about it.
They were probably going to die, but this was what they had been
waiting for their whole lives.

“Bet you a
dollar that when we get promoted I’ll be your boss,” said Matt.

Chen laughed
slightly, nervous but excited.

“If this goes
badly, we will be lucky to get a job cleaning toilets,” he
said.

“OK, but dibbs
on still being the boss because-”

Matt’s
reasoning was interrupted by a shriek of metal on metal as some
part of the station ripped away and fell towards the Anomaly. The
two astronauts waited, tensed and ready for action.

“That tearing
sounds was… ?” asked Matt.

“Our ship being
pulled from the station,” confirmed Chen tersely.

“Long walk
home,” said Matt quietly.

The station
vibrated around them and then fell silent. The lights flashed, went
dark, flashed, held steady, fell dark again. The lights continued
in this manner for a few seconds and then the station remained
dark. Chen moved over to a signalling station. He pushed a few
buttons and then hissed in annoyance. All their signalling systems
were offline, even the most basic and reliable of them. There would
be no contacting Earth for help, advice, or even just to say
goodbye.

“I have a
really big flashlight under my bunk,” offered Matt.

For once he
wasn’t joking. The lights were playing out a single word in Morse
code, over and over again. The Anomaly was trying to talk to them,
and they wanted to talk back. Matt found his torch, and he and Chen
searched the station for a window overlooking the Anomaly. One of
the many oddities of the station was its surplus of windows, and
one of them gave a magnificent view of the Anomaly with the planet
in the background. Matt handed Chen the light and pulled out a
notepad.

“Sending
‘contact’ back,” said Chen.

It was an
obvious start. Deciding what came next wasn’t nearly as easy.

“G-r-e-e-t-i-n-g-s space o-n space b-e-h-a-l-f space o-f space
e-a-r-t-h,” Matt wrote as Chen signalled.

It was the best
they could do on such short notice. Earth had never decided on the
best way to greet an alien intelligence, and the final protocol had
been decided by committee. It was long, tedious and, since it
required the sending of photos and music samples by radio, now
unworkable.

“If I thought
this might actually happen I would have spent more effort trying to
get the protocols changed,” Chen said.

They waited for
over an hour in the darkness. They didn’t talk. The station was
running on its emergency supplies of oxygen, and they both knew
they wouldn’t last forever.

The station
lights flicked on and stayed on. The life-support systems flicked
back on. This time the Anomaly’s contact was gentler, dimming the
lights rather than killing the station’s power.

“G-r-e-e-t-i-n-g-s space t-o space E-a-r-t-h space
s-i-g-n-a-l-l-i-n-g space p-e-a-c-e-f-u-l space
i-n-t-e-n-t-i-o-n-s,” Chen spelled out aloud as they watched the
lights.

The Anomaly
wanted to talk to them, alone and without interference from Earth.
They didn’t know why, but it was better than nothing. They
signalled their peaceful intentions back and waited. It was another
hour before the Anomaly signalled again.

“The Anomaly
wants to talk,” said Chen with a smile.

It made all the
fuse changing worthwhile, but left Matt wondering if this had
happened before. If this was the reason for Observer 3’s existence,
did the Anomaly’s damaging form of conversation explain the
station’s odd design? The excess of redundant life-support systems,
its absence of crew?

The thought
gave Matt cold shivers. Chen didn’t seem worried about it, and Matt
wasn’t sure if he was just being paranoid.

“Ask if it has
made contact before, Chen,” he said at last, deciding it was better
to look paranoid than be unprepared.

Chen called out
the letters as Matt wrote them down in his notebook.

“An eye of
Earth watched us, but to listen was to break. A second eye saw but
did not understand. This third eye heard once but ignored,
returning to the Earth-orb.”

Chen said,
reading the Anomaly’s answer as Matt wrote it down.

“Two eyes might
be Observers one and two, but I wonder if the last crew on this
station ran back to Earth when the station started shaking
around?”

Chen nodded in
agreement.

“That would
explain quite a lot, but not why EarthControl didn’t let us know
what to expect.”

They took a
moment to silently curse EarthControl.

“Permission to
converse?” read Chen aloud from the flashing messages.

Matt wrote this
down with the other of the Anomaly’s messages.

“I thought we
were conversing,” muttered Chen, “so what happens next?”

They made a
second copy of all the Anomaly’s messages and placed it in the
storage sections of Chen’s cabin with an outline of their
situation. Then they went to their own cabins and wrote out letters
to their family and friends in paper torn from Chen’s notepad. Like
all spaceship crew, they had in-case-of-death letters stored with
EarthControl, so the letters were brief.

Chen was
waiting for Matt by the window overlooking the Anomaly.

“It’s been a
pleasure,” he said unexpectedly but sincerely.

“Everyone who
knows me says that eventually,” joked Matt.

Chen glared at
him for a second and then smiled broadly for the first time since
Matt had known him.

“You’re an
idiot. Let’s hope this thing doesn’t use you to judge humankind.
Although if I am about to be utterly annihilated by conversing with
a powerful space creature, I’m glad you are here with me. That way
you can’t hit on my sister when I’m not around.”

“Cheers,” said
Matt, grinning, and clapped Chen on the back.

They were
silent for a moment, sincere. But they were men of action, so the
moment of reflection was short indeed.

They signalled
a short message to the Anomaly that they agreed to converse, and
then they waited. The Anomaly started to change colour slowly, a
rainbow palette spreading across its surface. It began to move
towards the station, spraying with an impossibly broad spectrum of
energy. It consumed the station and its crew quickly, drawing them
out of the solar system of their birth and deep into an abyss of
colours.

This story
begins with my brother spending my life savings on a remote control
helicopter. Don’t ask me how he got his hands on my money, or why I
couldn’t get it back, because that’s a story for another day. Let’s
just say he bought this helicopter, and take the story from
there.

My brother goes
through many phases of passion in his life, some more successful
than others. He loved that helicopter from the moment he saw it in
the store, and there was no power on this earth to stop him buying
it- not even common sense. He wasn’t a skilled pilot. He crashed
that poor helicopter into every tree in the park, into the ground,
into a rubbish bin and once even into my face. Here, look, I have
the scar to prove it. He spent his every free moment either flying
that thing or repairing it, and it was lucky for that he was a
better mechanic than he was a pilot.

He loved that
helicopter for a week, but after he saw the dragon he never even
looked at a helicopter again.

The thing about
my brother is that he either obsesses over things or ignores them
entirely. Like the time when he was five, and I bought him a book
about dinosaurs for his birthday. He learnt everything there was to
know about those creatures in two weeks, and I do mean everything:
types, diets, colours and scientific names. I thought I was on to a
good thing with the animal theme, so for Christmas, I bought him a
book about the African animals: elephants, leopards and the like.
He opened the book, paged through it quickly and put it away, more
interested in lunch than lions.

Two months
later I asked him if he had liked the book. I had seen the way he
had looked at it, so I was expecting him to say he hadn’t opened it
more than once. He surprised me by telling me that he had enjoyed
it immensely, and grabbed it off his shelf to show me what he had
done with it. He gave me the book, and I opened it curiously,
unsure of what I would see. I laughed when I saw what was on the
pages: my brother had drawn dinosaurs on every single page,
artfully working them into the existing pictures so that they were
eating elephants, chasing lions or grazing alongside zebra. I asked
him why he had drawn in the book, he shrugged and said he had run
out of scrap paper. To this day, he can tell you how many bones an
allosaurus had in its neck, but he can’t tell the difference
between a lion and a leopard. True story.

So you can see
how buying presents for my brother is pretty hit-or-miss. He
ignored the ant farm, but fell in love with the chemistry kit. He
adores the juggling set but hates steam engines and painting. He
enjoys board games, but only when we make the rules up as we go
along. Three years ago I bought him an origami calendar, the type
with a small animal that could be made every day. I bought it
because it was cheap and I had no better ideas, but it was a real
hit. He finished the whole thing in a week and then we both forgot
all about it. Neither he nor I ever thought it would completely
change his life.

This story took
place in the old-fashioned house just down the road from you, where
the spry old lady lived alone but for her ancient dog. The old lady
–you must have seen her once or twice- was a hundred and three, but
cheerful and fit for her age, passing the time gardening and
pottering around in her house. The lady’s husband had died a year
before this story, and her world had gradually shrunk until the
garden walls became the borders of her life. She lived, as far as
anyone on the street knew, on the charity of meals-on-wheels and
groceries brought round by her niece every fortnight. Her niece was
the only relative who made a habit of visiting her, as the old lady
had no children and only a small family.

The old lady
and her pet lived small, quiet lives of classical music, dusty
books and decades of treasured memories. They always look quite
happy working in the garden, growing herbs and tiny red flowers and
large white roses. It was a peaceful life, but their peace was
rudely disrupted when my brother’s helicopter flew wildly over the
wall and landed in a rose bush, sending petals everywhere.

To this day my
brother still claims that the helicopter was caught up in the
insubstantial but whirling hands of a passing air elemental and
thrown over the wall. I’ll bet you a dollar that he simply flew it
too high into the air, lost control, and sent it wheeling across
the sky into the old lady’s garden. Regardless of the cause, my
brother was hardly going to lose his new pride and joy, so he
chased it across the road and climbed the small wall into the
garden after it. He dropped down into the garden and was greeted by
the old lady, who was as astonished to see him as you might expect.
She was holding his downed chopper by its tail and wearing a
bemused expression.

It was lucky
for my brother that the old lady didn’t get a lot of visitors, and
she was happy to see a new face. My brother apologised at length
for the interruption, but the old woman said to forget about it.
Her husband had planted the roses during one of his rare moments of
gardening fervour, but she had been pruning them anyway. Then she
invited my brother in for a cup of tea.

He said yes, of
course, because he can be quite charming when the occasion calls
for it.

They walked
into the house, and it immediately occurred to my brother that the
living room alone was wider than the whole house. The roof was also
higher than should have been possible, with ceilings five metres
above his head. The room was decorated with bright flowers and
pictures of the woman’s family and friends. My brother couldn’t
help but notice that some of the friends had three heads, or five
eyes, or were blue with long white wings.

He was about to
comment on this when he saw a creature run from under a chair and
behind a table. He recognised it at once: a paper
Tyrannosaurus
rex
, and saw that it was playfully chasing a paper unicorn. The
pair noticed his gaze and froze in fear. He reached down towards
them, and they took off to hide behind a bookcase. Curious, my
brother began to look around for more animals and found them hiding
behind the pictures, under the furniture and cowering next to
vases. My brother stood dead still, and a few of the braver animals
peeked out at him.